Running: The first half of tonight’s run went really well, but the second half was tough thanks to my decision to run yesterday on my scheduled day off. Between the 3 and 3.5 mile mark of my 5 mile loop, I have to run up a pretty steady incline, and once I reached the top tonight, I really thought I was going to have to stop. It wasn’t that my legs couldn’t take it, but my core muscles just felt exhausted. That’s a little depressing considering I used to run 10+ miles in a single run, but I pushed on and made it home without stopping, which felt VERY good. I did spend the first five minutes after my run lying on the front porch, debating whether to roll to the door or go for my cool down walk. I went for my walk. It felt good.
Writing: Here’s a question I received via email today:
“Can you tell us anything about your previous work?”
My first (unpublished) novel was very much a young adult fantasy, most likely because I was a teenager at the time. My second novel, the first and only one I’ve sold to date, was more of a thriller. That one was published by a New York publisher. Soon after that novel was published I sold a very dark, supernatural novella to a great small press. The experience of working with this independent publisher was VERY different, for reasons I might go into later on.
The novel my agent is shopping right now is very dark thematically speaking — editors have compared it to The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold and The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst and The Night Country by Stewart O’Nan. So far the literary presses are saying it’s too commercial and the commercial publishers are saying it’s too literary. 
I have a hard time assigning categories to what I write. I tend to just write the stories I’m interested in — and then I let other people call them what they will.
This new book is going to be a very bleak, but I’m hoping the challenges the protagonist faces will be compelling enough to draw readers past that bleakness. We’ll see.
I’m going to do some more rewriting. Thanks for reading.
wr…thanks for the comment on my most recent post. you’re my first (commenter, that is). writing and running are, for me at least, very similar. very individual, solo activities, often times painful. and they both tend to require a near constant internal pep rally, less they wither on the vine and slowly become a pastime. but there’s no equal to the feeling of accomplishment i get when i’ve done either of them well.
keep on truckin…and get out on the trails, eh?
cheers.
Thanks for posting, Jeb! I’m definitely looking forward to some more trail running soon!